From Cape Town with Love (34 page)

Dad had gotten so good without his cane that I didn't hear him until he was in the kitchen doorway. He was wearing the faded LAPD sweatpants he liked to sleep in.

“Damn,” Dad said, flicking on the kitchen light to see the blood. “You found him?”

I nodded. “At a nightclub in Culver City.” I paused, my tongue almost too heavy for the task. “He got away. All we got is a first name. In other words, nothing.”

“He make you?”

My face was still disguised. The glue on my skin itched like hell.

“Maybe. Probably. Or maybe he just doesn't like being followed.”

Both of us mulled that over while the refrigerator broke into its tuneless hum. If Spider had guessed that I was the man he'd met on the football field, I had jeopardized the drop-off again. The whole way home, I'd braced for a frantic call from Sofia.

I dabbed alcohol on my back, and it felt like liquid fire. I gritted my teeth, but part of me reveled in the pain. Pain was a relief from everything else I was feeling.

“Gonna need stitches, son.”

“Not now, Dad. What's the FBI saying about Paki?” The birth father was my last lead.

“Nothing since ten. Still in interview. Maybe they held him overnight. I prolly won't hear back till morning.”

“I can't just sit on my hands.”

“Think that's best now,” Dad said. “Don't you?”

He didn't say
I told you so,
but he didn't have to. Dad left the kitchen doorway, and I thought he might be finished with talking to me for the
night. But he came back with a large first aid kit. “Marcela keeps this for me,” he said. “Come on to the living room, Tennyson.”

I sat shirtless on the sofa while my father tended my injury with unsteady hands. I was way beyond Band-Aids, but Dad's kit had gauze and medical tape. I helped him wrap the tape tightly from my back around my abdomen, holding the gauze in place. Not long before, I was the one who'd been trying to mend
him.
Like Octavia Butler wrote,
The only lasting truth is Change.

My neck was exhausted, so I kept my head and eyes low.

Marcela shuffled out of Dad's bedroom in my father's rumpled terry cloth robe, sleepy. She didn't always sleep over, but now she did more and more.

“Dios
—what happened?” she said, alarmed.

“Cut his back,” Dad said. “He's all right.”

Marcela was a trained nurse, but she hung back to let Dad finish his work. Some jobs are for parents alone. “Ten, I could heat up some food . . . ,” she said.

I shook my head. I hadn't eaten since lunch, but food was a foreign concept as a harrowing truth settled across my spirit: Of
course
Spider had recognized me! He wouldn't have tried to kill a random intruder. Marsha had said Kingdom of Heaven liked to make an example of families who didn't play by their rules.

I might have sealed Nandi's death.

“Doesn't need food,” I heard my father say, like a dream. “He needs rest.”

I didn't make the decision to lie down on the sofa, but my body improvised without me. My eyes had battled with me while I drove home, and I finally gave them their way. I could have wrapped myself in that darkness for years.

Finally, I grasped the notion of wanting to stay in bed and never get up. My agent, Len, had tried to explain depression to me after his divorce, when he popped prescription pills like candy to get through his day. I wanted to call Len up and apologize to him for every bullshit pep talk I'd ever given him. I wanted to apologize to Chela for trying to convince her that control and comfort were anything except illusions. Delusions.

The world was a house of horrors. End of story. The rest was bullshit.

To me, only seconds had passed when I opened my eyes and saw Chela sitting in my father's lounger, watching me sleep. Dad and Marcela were nowhere in sight.

My back was still on fire; maybe the pain had awakened me. When I shifted position on the sofa, my spine's dull shout became a scream. Knives hurt in a much more personal way than clubs or even fists. Knives are a violation.

The living room was dark. Except for the pain, I might have been dreaming.

“What are you doing up?” I said.

“Waiting for you. Nobody told me you were down here.”

“You're supposed to be asleep. It's late.”

“You mean early,” Chela said.

I might have dozed again. When I opened my eyes, Chela hadn't moved from her post, guarding me. She was rocking slowly back and forth in the chair, with a squeaking that sounded like a ticking clock.

“Tomorrow morning,” I said, bleary, as if she'd asked me a question.

“What's tomorrow?”

“I'll start calling, like I said . . . try to find your mother.”

“I don't have a mother,” Chela said.

You and me both.
The grief I'd always felt for the woman I'd never known shook me again. “You know what I mean,” I said. “I'll work on . . . getting her consent.”

“What about Nandi?” Chela said.

A fist stuffed my throat, blocking my breath. I had to confess the worst to Chela.

“I can't do anything for Nandi,” I said. “I'm in the way. I probably got her killed.”

“Oh, so you're just gonna buy that bullshit from the FBI?”

Only the chair's persistent squeaking kept me awake, Chela swinging slowly back and forth. The moonlight from a window caught her hair, like a halo. Was she a dream after all?

“I'm not what you think I am, Chela.”

“You're not the guy who figured out who killed Afrodite when the cops were too busy to look for the real suspect? Made them look like assholes when T. D. Jackson died?”

“That guy got lucky.” If
luck
was the right word for what I'd been through.

“Bullshit,”
Chela said. “You're still that guy, Ten.”

I hadn't realized my eyes were closed until I opened them again. This time, I saw a shimmer on Chela's cheeks; she was crying. Chela's tears made me sit up. My back screamed at me again, and the haze of unreality lifted. Suddenly, I was wide awake.

Chela's face was bright red. She looked as if she was holding her breath.

“Chela . . . ?” I said.

“I keep thinking about her,” Chela said, her whisper weighted with tears. “Scared. All alone with these assholes. Missing her mother.” She couldn't clamp back her sob.

“Hon, these are bad guys, but they made a deal with Maitlin. Besides, the FBI has a real suspect. By ten o'clock tonight, this will all be over. Nandi will come home.”

I didn't believe it, but I wanted to.
Maybe if I convince Chela, I'll convince myself.

But Chela shook her head. She leaned forward, suddenly older than her years. “Things don't just work out, Ten,” she said. “That's a load of crap. The only time anything works out is when you
make
it work out. Like when I decided to stay with you instead of going back to Mother's.” For the first time, Chela had said she was glad she'd never gone back to her madam.

I couldn't face the expectations in her eyes. “Chela . . .”

“I was a little kid, and I was
alone.
I was stuck in the house with my dead grandmother, hoping she wouldn't start to stink, or come back to life in the middle of the night like a zombie, thinking, ‘Oh, it'll all work out somehow.' Well, guess what—it
didn't.
Not until I met you.”

Chela was shaking, her sobs filling the room. The eleven-year-old inside her had never died. Our eleven-year-olds never do.

“Shhhh
. . . sweetheart, come here . . . ,” I said, reaching for her.

Chela rushed to me, folding inside my arms. We rocked on the sofa, both of us flooding in her tears. I'd always avoided holding her before, an invisible boundary. But we had crossed a threshold together, and it was finally all right.

Chela sniffed, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her T-shirt. “I know you can do it. You can find her, Ten—but not if you quit now. You're the one who's
supposed
to bring her home.”

I would have chuckled if I could have. Chela had spent too much time with Dad.

“Like fate?” I said. “Since when do you believe in that?”

“Since you.”

Dad cracked his door open when he heard our voices. He peered out at us, looking worried, so I raised my hand to gesture:
We're all right.
Dad silently closed his door again.

I must have been half delirious when I first woke, seeing Chela, because it was close to dawn and I hadn't realized it. The rising sun, not the moon, had shown me Chela's face.

I hugged my daughter, wondering how I'd missed the room's light.

Chela boosts Tennyson by pool

http://www.simonandschuster.com/multimedia?video=87316083001

“I don't understand,” I said to the speakerphone that was now the centerpiece of my dining-room table. “How the fuck did that happen?”

Maybe there's a limit to the bad news we can absorb. I felt nothing except confusion. A heavy sigh flooded the speaker. My father leaned over the table, bracing himself with locked arms, his snowy eyebrows furrowed with outrage.

“No idea,” Lieutenant Nelson answered on the phone. “My guy's just saying they lost him. He was released at about five thirty, and now he's in the wind.”

He could have been speaking Mandarin. My mind didn't register the words.

“Nobody was following him?” I said.

“Tried to,” Nelson said. “He evaded. Had help waiting, my guess. Ditched his cell phone so the FBI couldn't keep him on GPS. He fooled 'em into complacency. The tail was just a precaution—nobody thought he was their guy. His polygraph didn't look right, but his record in South Africa was clean.”

My rage erupted, sudden and deep.
“MotherFUCKERS!”

I picked up the first thing I saw—an empty coffee mug from the Monterey Jazz Festival I'd attended with Alice years before—and threw it against the nearest wall. The mug disintegrated, but I'd hoped for an explosion that would shake the house.

Dad put a firm hand on my shoulder to hold me still.

“His apartment?” Dad said, raising his voice for the phone.

“That's the last place he'd go, but they're keeping an eye on it. Sorry, Preach.” A pause. “Sorry, Ten. That's all I've got, and don't expect any more bulletins. The feds just went into strict cover-your-ass mode.”

I walked away from the phone. The storm inside me needed somewhere to go, so I paced the living room. Chela and Marcela watched from the outer ring, somber.

The FBI had lost Paki. Nandi's last chance—gone. The best-case scenario was that her father was taking her back to South Africa. Worstcase scenario, Paki's crew had panicked and killed Nandi after the FBI brought him in for questioning. Or after my encounter with Spider. Hell, they might have killed Paki, too. He might have escaped right into a landfill.

Either way, Sofia Maitlin would never see Nandi again.

“What about Spider?” I called to the phone.

“Nothing stateside yet, and I'm hearing there's a shitload of Mhambis in the system in South Africa,” Nelson said. “I'll try to narrow it down, but we need a surname.”

Maybe Marsha has something by now,
I thought without wanting to. I didn't know if I was desperate enough to try to call her, but how much more desperate could I be?

“Least they can't pin this on LAPD,” Nelson said, a company man to the core.

The room was silent until the phone spat out a grating busy signal. Dad was closest, so he rested the receiver on the cradle to bring back the quiet.

“Well,
that
bites,” Chela said.

My cell phone's battery was nearly dead, so I found the charger and plugged it in before I dialed Rachel Wentz's number. Someone had to tell Maitlin that the FBI had lost their suspect.

The call went directly to voice mail. Before I left a message, I thought better of my plan and hung up. No need to drag Rachel Wentz into a legal nightmare over FBI leaks. They would find out sooner or later.

“Vamos,
Captain,” Marcela said. “Let's you and me cook up some breakfast.”

Dad followed her into the kitchen, squeezing my shoulder as he passed me. I tensed, involuntarily shrugging away his touch.

My fingers played with my phone's keypad, ready to dial the number I didn't want to.

My anger was still on the surface, potent as ever. I couldn't make myself call Marsha.

I didn't have to.

The doorbell had rung by the time I got out of the shower.

Marsha was a spectacle when she showed up on my doorstep with a dozen huge long-stemmed sunflowers, in a strapless summer dress that matched the petals. She looked freshly bathed, without makeup. Her raw beauty was almost enough to make me glad to see her.

“That's funny . . . ,” I heard Chela mutter behind me, “. . . she doesn't
look
like a vampire.”

Looks can be deceiving,
I thought. I finally noticed that Chela had neglected to make it to school by her 7:20 starting time again, but a bigger problem was on my doorstep.

Marsha held the flowers out toward me, but I let her keep them.

“Can we talk like adults?” she said.

I decided not to invite Marsha inside. “Come on in, since you're here,” I said instead.

Until the doorbell rang, the family had been waiting for me at the table, my father ready to say grace. A large bowl of scrambled eggs, a plate of turkey bacon, and a pancake stack waited, cooling. I halfheartedly introduced Marsha as an old friend from high school, and she glowed as if we'd thrown a party in her honor. The smile Marcela usually wore for company was absent.

“Sorry to drop in so early,” Marsha said. “I see you're having breakfast.”